Biometric authentication is used to provide access to places, goods or services in a secure manner.
Typically, the user to be authenticated presents: a fingerprint, an iris or the like, to a biometric authentication system. An image of this feature is then obtained and analyzed so that it can be compared with a bank of pre-recorded user-associated images. When the resulting image is a pre-recorded image, it is checked whether the user to whom the pre-recorded image corresponds is allowed or denied access to the secure site, good or service.
To facilitate the search for the pre-recorded image, the user may be asked to identify himself/herself, for example by entering his/her name on a keyboard or by presenting an access badge. Thus, the pre-recorded image which corresponds to the thus identified user can be directly searched and the comparison can be carried out more rapidly.
The inventor identified, in this process, two separate steps to be performed by the user: presenting a non-biometric identification means (presenting a badge, entering a name on a keyboard) and presenting a biometric feature (iris, fingerprint, or the like).
The use of biometric authentication may thus suffer slowness in its implementation.
Thus, there is a need to make the biometric authentication of users easier and/or faster to implement, particularly from the point of view of the authenticated user.